I’ve taken a lot of flack over IM today as this news has gotten around. It’s been a bit bizarre! Understandable, though. I’d feel the same way my friends seem to.

But not as bizarre as having this photo show up on the Cult of Mac blog only four hours after I took it. Without my permission. (It’s OK, I wrote him and told him he could use it after I saw it there. But that wasn’t my first reaction.)

Did you put the picture up on Flickr? I was under the impression that as soon as it goes up there, it becomes pretty much public domain, so no one needs your permission any more as long as they source it.

I did put it on Flickr, yes. But it’s not the case that anything on Flickr is fair game. Many people treat Flickr images that way, but that’s not legal.

Every Flickr user (usr?) has the ability to set a license for all their photos, and to change that license for individual photos. You can set an “all rights reserved” license, which means no one else is allowed to copy it or use it elsewhere. You’ve also got any of these six Creative Commons licenses to use on any photo.

My default license is the “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” license, which means you have to tell people the photo is mine, you can’t make money off my photo, and, to quote the CC people, “If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.”